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Saturday, March 23, 2013

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour.

Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now.

Environmentalism has degenerated into a conviction that all human activity is destructive because the species of man is the greatest threat to the planet and all life on it. Each death, each act of undoing and unmaking, each darkness that is brought about by the cessation of humanity becomes a profoundly environmentalist activity.

Kill yourself and save the planet. Put out the lights, tear down the city and let the earth revert to some imaginary primeval paradise free of all pollution; whether it is the carbon breath of men, dogs and cows or the light pollution of their cities.

Embrace the darkness.

While we take electric light for granted-- being able to read and write after dark is a technological achievement that transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle.

During the recent extended blackout after Hurricane Sandy, some of us had a brief period of reverting to a pre-technological civilization in which work was governed by day and night cycles. And that was a reminder that there is no way to measure the increase in knowledge gained from the conquest of the darkness. There is no better measure of the unthinking contempt of the environmentalist movement for that achievement than a call to turn off the lights and sit in the dark.

Like all environmental gimmicks, Earth Hour is perverse and hypocritical. Far more energy is consumed promoting it, then is saved by practicing it.

Websites switch to black, even though displaying black on television sets or monitors consumes more energy. Turning off electricity to entire buildings after working hours and then turning it on costs more than letting it run. And getting 90 million people across the country to turn their power on and off at a scheduled time is an energy savings disaster. And since power companies draw down on their more expensive 'green' generators first, Earth Hour actually shuts down 'green' power.

But its sponsors don't claim that Earth Hour saves energy or prevents us from polluting the globe. Like every environmentalist stunt from flying rock stars around the world on jet planes to carving thousands of statues made of ice and then leaving them to melt in a public square, Earth Hour is meant to spread awareness.

Spreading awareness is the sole purpose of most environmental activism. Awareness spreading doesn't make anything better, but makes people feel guilty, outraged, hopeful or some combination of the appropriate political sentiments in the face of an imminent armageddon that can only be fought by convincing everyone to be deeply concerned by it and disdainful of everyone who stands outside their Chicken Little consensus.

The WWF, Earth Hour's godmother, has learned that shrill attention seeking is a reliable fundraising method. One of the WWF's more memorable fundraising methods was an ad that showed hundreds of planes headed toward the World Trade Center, to highlight just how much more important their work is than fighting terrorism. Franny Armstrong of Age of Stupid, which was promoted by the WWF, ran a 10:10 campaign in the UK, whose ads featured environmentalists murdering dissenters, including a group of schoolchildren. The ads are just ads, but London's leftist former mayor, Ken Livingstone had said of Age of Stupid, "Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film."

That is the dark side of environmentalism. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism's creed that the only real problem with the world is people. No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

The Nazis were among the most enthusiastic environmentalists of their day, even the term 'Ecology' was coined by Ernst Haeckel, whose racial views served as precursors to Nazi eugenics. But while Nazi environmentalist believed that we were all animals, they insisted that some animals were better than others. Modern environmentalists believe that we are all worse than animals. In their view we are both natural and unnatural. Natural because we come from the ape and unnatural because we are intelligent. We live on the planet, but our intelligence excludes us from ever belonging to it.

The incompatibility of productive man with the natural world is a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement. Everything we do is destructive, because of what we are. We are tool builders, inventors and producers. And the environmentalist movement is aimed at convincing us to stop being these things. To turn off the lights, make do with less and march back to the caves with a few clever ad campaigns and a catchy tune.

Zero Population campaigns and calls for mandatory one-child families are the eugenics of environmentalism. The old eugenicists were concerned with improving the human breed by promoting the reproduction of some, and preventing the reproduction of others. Environmental eugenics treats all of mankind as an inferior race. We all must die.

Not only mankind must go, but all the animals that man has domesticated and bred-- cows, dogs and cats. That is why PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats a year, promotes the euthanasia of wild cats and pet spaying and its staffers have even been known to kidnap animals and then kill them. It is why the Global Warming crowd has made cow emissions into their whipping bovine.

It's not enough to kill man, tear down his cities and put out his lights. His cats and dogs and his cows and sheep must also die.

Environmentalism is not motivated by a love for all creatures, but by preference for a prehuman world of natural wilderness uncultivated by man. The political leftist romanticizes the noble savage over the civilized man and its environmentalist arm romanticizes the jungle over the thousand acre farm. It prefers the the swamp to the garden, the wolf to the dog, and the tiger to the house cat.

This preference is not scientific, it is emotional, rooted in an antipathy to industrialization and human development. It wraps itself in the cloak of science, but it is a reactionary longing for a romanticized past that never existed.

In the environmental bible-- man is the source of all evil. The transition from the nomadic to the domestic, the village to the city, and the craftsman to the factory, is its version of original sin.

The environmentalist began with a distaste for human civilization and the fetishization of the rural farm life of the peasant. The champions of this "naturalism" were invariably urban artists and writers from the upper classes who were enthusiastic about being in touch with nature. After them came the "Nature Fakers" crafting myths about the high moral standards of wild animals. Domestic animals in such stories were always wicked and dumb, while wild animals lived deep and spiritual lives out in the woods. And so the animal kingdom was subdivided into the noble savage and the uncle tom.

The world was divided into two polar opposites, the green and the gray, in an apocalyptic struggle. Either man would drown the world in industry, or he would return to a natural way of life through a lethal virus (Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826), a devastating war (H.G. Wells), oppressive social policies (Edward Bellamy) or eco-terrorism (The Monkey Wrench Gang). The more civilization grew, the more apocalyptic the scenarios became culminating in the two great environmental myths; nuclear winter and global warming. These apocalyptic myths have served the same purpose for environmentalists as apocalypses do for all religions. They predict a time when the sinful order is overturned and the earth is renewed to make way for the faithful.

Man is the environmentalist's devil. He must be beaten, broken and subjugated. Even the animals he has bred, who are the spark of his genius, must be taken out and killed. Take away his food and his power. Blame him for the natural cycles of the planet and the inevitable extinction of species that goes on whether he is there or not. Take away his technology and his inventions. Tell him that the humblest bacteria is better than him, for it is dumb and follows its natural instincts, while he insists on using his mind. Take away his primacy and his learning. And then leave him in the dark.

The environmental movement is tenacious, fanatical and deceptive. Its creed is the undoing of all human progress. There is money to be made from that, as there is in all revolutions, but beneath the inconveniences of living under an environmental regime, from dirty clothes to high taxes, while being forced to listen to the hypocrisies and false pieties of the Gorean clergy of environmentalist activists heating their mansions while the poor freeze in energy poverty, is the darker reality that environmentalism is an anti-human movement with a vicious hostility toward man and the civilization he has built. Whatever he has built, it must destroy.

The gap between darkness and light is a profound symbol in every civilization. The light of knowledge pitted against the shadowy dark of ignorance. The light reveals, but the darkness hides.

Civilization and the moral code exist in the light of awareness, but the darkness is home to unthinking bestial things. To call for a return to the darkness is a profound act of symbolism. A civilization that celebrates a return to the darkness for even a single hour is longing for a return to a deeper state of darkness. A darkness of the soul.

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comments:

This is one of your best columns, Daniel, it's a keeper, and I'll be passing the link around. You have identified that environmentalism is as nihilistic as is Islam, that it, too, is a man-hater. Not very many people make the connection, they never follow the logic to its ultimate conclusion: that the environmentalists wish man to perish. It doesn't matter to them how diligent one is in "recycling" or buying the politically correct light bulbs or using cloth instead of paper or plastic grocery bags. The final destination, marked out by the environmentalists, is death. On the surface, they worship the allegedly intrinsic "value" of nature, but what they really object to is man who can alter that nature to survive and enjoy his existence. Their own "Final Solution" is the extermination of man. They wish for our non-existence.

I wonder if the rest of us died and only these wackos were left....with plenty of food, water, shelter and electricity...what would they do with their time? Or would they feel their life's work had been accomplished and have the world's largest voluntary death camp (by starvation only) in the middle of their local woods?

We're getting there.... the prophets of Israel warned us long ago that those who do evil, they are not as whom they really appear, their evil is offered as the highest virtue on earth.

Destroying human civilization is evil of the highest order. We are commanded to care for G-d's world and His creation but we must never subjugate ourselves to its yoke.

Paganism hides behind Earth worship and as expressed in modern environmentalism, its the very antithesis of our Judeo-Christian civilization. There's truth to be said that when we embrace literal darkness on Earth Day, we also embrace the darkness in our own souls.

Beauty and goodness is always revealed in light, whether its to be found in the lights of the Menorah or its revealed in the Star Of Christmas that attends the birth of Christ. So will it be from the beginning of the world unto the ends of Time.

"Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour."

Ars longa, vita brevis.

I know arts in the sense of this quote doesn't refer to the fine arts but in my mind it includes the fine arts, especially music. I've been listening to the song Central Park, a track on the 2005 King Kong score composed by the brilliant James Newton Howard--composer of the score to the deeply spiritual movie Alive.

Central Park must be beautiful with just the right amount of natural and artificial lighting at night. If the environmentalists had their way they'd want the park to go dark for an hour.

I doubt they value any art form that nourishes the human soul or life. James Newton Howard is a genius. His music does brighten the human spirit and will endure longer than these life hating environmentalists.

"Grant me the strength, time and opportunity always to correct what I have acquired, always to extend its domain; for knowledge is immense and the spirit of man can extend indefinitely to enrich itself daily with new requirements. Today he can discover his errors of yesterday and tomorrow he can obtain a new light on what he thinks himself sure of today."

There is another observation to be made here. If environmentalists existed in pre-history, they would have objected to cavemen using fire to cook their food and keep warm, because the smoke from their fire would be "polluting" the atmosphere, never mind the volcano a hundred miles away spewing millions of tons of ash into the air, in fact, more "pollutants" in one day than all of industrial civilization's in history ever generated. They would have objected to man creating tools from rock and wood. They would have objected to discovering the wheel, and agriculture, and longevity. In short, had environmentalists existed in pre-history, man would have been extinguished long before he could even record history. Which leaves the paradoxical question: would there have been any environmentalists today to object? But then, environmentalists are not guilty of merely looking a gift-horse in the mouth; they want to kill it.

The ANTIDOTE In my younger days I read all of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.All of their science fiction stories were just swimming in optimism, the promise of adventure and mystery and the possibility of man's accomplishments made the world a wonderous place. The possibility that advances in science and technology might someday give man the ability to build whole new worlds in space or on other planets was exciting.

The picture that Daniel paints is of a world that is clinically depressed.It's of a whole society that is mentally ill, I think depression might be a communicable disease.

In any group of humans there will always be optimists and pessimists.The problem comes when the pessimists gain control of society, as in Obama shutting down NASA.And another problem comes when the enemies of the United States, the Leftists and Islamists, use the "useful idiot pessimists" to subvert our country, to weaken us, to instill a defeatist attitude, to make their conquest of the US that much easier.

I have always found it hilarious the the Enviro-nazis will call the rest of us "flat-earthers" and then ignore the science that has proven that there has been at least 5 drastic and cataclysmic climate changes throughout the planets history.

At the risk of enducing a vomitous reaction and involuntary curling of the upper lip from those inextractably steeped in humanist sentiments, I would add only this to this excellent,excellent article on the environmentalist and other movements to kill mankind and all that he's touched ..."The Devil is in the details" (literally)..." we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." "Imago Dei", and all that means, has always been fair game. Maybe one more thing ... Knowledge begins with "the fear of the LORD".

Daniel wrote:"Zero Population campaigns and calls for mandatory one-child families are the eugenics of environmentalism."

In the eighties and nineties it was popular to conjecture on the effects of China's single-child policy on the nation's development. We in American foreign studies programs called the single children of modernizing Chinese "Little Emperors" for the amount of doting parents are forced to devote to their single, legal chance to procreate.

Well, as usual, as we Yanks were distracted by China's potential pathologies, we failed to notice our own. [This is anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but...] A majority of my acquaintances who work in academe (all "liberals) were single children.

They cannot hide it either. Many reveal in their political views and debating styles that they have never contended with any sibling for Legos, parental attention nor mundane chores. And they seem unaware that their liberal campaigns for illusory things such as "sustainability" and "world peace" are rote manifestations of their single-child experience.

As America digests its own poison-pill generation of spoilt, single children cum adults, it should rile noone to state the obvious: America's citizenry are the managed wards of our own arrogant, spoilt "Emperors."

Simply sample the biographies of our current ruling class. Obama is this generation's icon: globe-trotting, wealthy, doted-on, and without competition in the family!

Some properly derogate this generation by calling it the "Me-Generation." Others patronize this cadre and rebel at crude categorization of it, preferring to flatter it with labels like "Creative," "modern," and "Taste-Makers."

No matter the label we use to identify this trend, it is what it is. And it'd like to replicate itself of course to form another first-person pronoun hyphenated generation to govern the besotted masses for the century ahead.

To the spoilt, urban prograssive, Kids from big "fly-over" families are drole and tacky. They aren't easily cowed by external scolds and peer pressures, and they're wake-up to the games adversaries like to play, like deliberate dishonesty, proxy moves and brown-nosing. In short, if you're the third son in a Kansas family with 4 other siblings, two of them sisters, then you are immunized against the Prog's campusing techniques.

But "Little Emperors," not so much. They're nubile, malleable little princes and princesses, hungry to strive any 'attagirl' or confirmation of their uncontested merits, greater beauty or smarts. And being untested entrants to the Progs' series' of artificial societies, they suffer from performance anxiety. The spoilt child is the perfect, nervous little tool for the march to the Progressive's vaunted future and beyond!

Lol. Poor, insipid thinking. Here's a thought. The well funded "environmental movement," is well funded because its the controlled opposition to the corporations wrecking the planet for profit. There shard goal is population reduction.

After all, a person doesn't have to be eco-lefty to object to pollution of their living space and wrecking their environment.

Consider the Gulf Oil Spill which wrecked the Gulf of Mexico eco- system. The "Greens," weren't around. No one on Gulf Coast saw any "Green protest." There was no national debate about the most devastating ecological disaster to ever hit the United States. Instead the "Greens" largely kept quite, while nearly all other dissenting voices were bought off or intimidated into silence.

As such, we have established a precedent of corporations recklessly destroying an eco system, and punished by "fines." When the green opposition is bought, and funded by the same corporate interest which they "oppose," its no wonder some people think the BP oil disaster is a shining example of corporate responsibility to the people and the environment.

One more reason to make the empowerment of the common man central to the sustainability of civilization. The elites, when left to their own devices, always come up with some kooky theories that when implemented blow everything up. It's not that the common man is any more rational, although "he" often is, it's that he is often far less radical in his desire solutions than the elites. His often justifiable self-doubt (of the composite "common man") beats the certainty of a particular elite in power any time.

The environmental movement is heavily funded by corporations and there are plenty of corporations making plenty of money from taxpayer subsidies for their Green Energy gimmicks, not to mention wasteful recycling and plots to impose a carbon tax and energy poverty on millions

The Green opposition runs on dirty cash. Al Gore is the perfect example of that.

Daniel,have you seen this video from MSNBC: where the host calls a fertilized egg "a thing" with "economic consequences."My Cuban born Jewish husband has been saying Obama and the power brokers of the Left are evil for some time. I have resisted this call but it seems they are coming out of the closet. My greatest fear is American's won't recoil from such hatred.http://www.mrctv.org/videos/harris-perrys-fetal-indifference-what-it-costs-have-thing-turn-human

Of course a fetus has to be a 'thing'. To even crack the door on some other possibility brings the whole house of cards tumbling down.

One only has to advocate sex selection via abortion to watch all but the most ardent pro-choicer recoil. And I mean advocate for it...don't just raise it as some evil specter.

After all, there's no ethical or moral dilemma to abortion outside the woman's choice, is there? The woman who wants a son so she aborts a succession of girl 'feotuses' ought to be above reproach.

In an attempt to stir the pot I've been known to suggest that we encourage abortion among those with no demonstrable means of support. Even paying them abort a baby.

At a family dinner over Christmas I was listening to various left-of-center relatives advocating for increased funding of all the various welfare type assistance programs directed towards women, particularly those focusing on neo-natal and infant care. I asked "what if we paid women, say, $1000, to abort their baby? We'd come out ahead in birthing costs alone. How much extra money do you think that would free up for those who decide to keep their baby? Somebody get me a calculator and a pen and in five minutes I'll have a rough estimate on this napkin right here."

It is amazing how fast your average pro-choicer can gin up some morality-tinged repugnancy at such suggestions.

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.Helen KellerRead more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_religion.html#74jTVeH6dCdcMrcv.99

7000.000.000 of us, driving SUVs, eating tuna sushi and tossing our the plastic wrap from our wrapped everything everywhere is a bit much. On the other hand I have no idea how much methane the dinosaur produced, perhaps enough to have caused their extinction.I fully understand that for the sake of argument Daniel, you limit your arguments to black and white, but in reality there are fifty shades of grey. And I see the "Earth Hour"as one of those, be it childish, shades.

"That is why PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats a year, promotes the euthanasia of wild cats and pet spaying and its staffers have even been known to kidnap animals and then kill them..." This is not true.

The overpopulation of domestic cats and dogs is a serious problem and is the cause of much animal suffering. There is simply not enough cages and 'good homes' for all the unwanted abandoned cats and dogs. So-called 'no kill' shelters only adopt out healthy, young animals. The unadoptable are then taken to full-service shelters which have to do society's dirty work by providing euthanasia. Then, the 'no kill' shelters advertise and fund-raise about the 'cruel' full service shelters.

And, what is wrong with having pet animals spayed and neutered?

This is a complex problem but it is not related to the environmentalists' hypocrisy you write about.

For a full explanation of the cat/dog overpopulation problem, there's a video called "Born To Be Betrayed" by The True Nature Network. You can see it free at www.youtube.com/user/truenaturenetwork

Very apt analogy, Daniel. Darkness and ignorance are hallmarks of the radical "enviro's". Good data, with experimental validation, is the breath of sunshine that must be used to disinfect the ongoing enviro-disease with patience and persistence. We need the "Golden Ten" charts that tell the truth of man-made global warming, cap 'N Trade, "Green Power", Polar bears, Glaciers etc. Then truth-seekers must rally around the data and keep them rigorous, honest, up to date and in high visibility.

ANY COUNTRY who kills their children,IS OVER...........GOD does not allow blood sacifiacing children,no matter who thinks they own them,and putting baby parts in the food supply is even worse,YEA,AMERICA I'AM TALKING ABOUT "YOU"...........................

The cause of all this depression about human beings is the lack of knowledge or belief that we are made differently than the rest of creation. The West use to believe that men and women were made in the likeness of God. No more.

Now, we are made in the likeness of whoever political powers that be, or educational, or moneyed, or Marxist, or just plain stupid powers.

In the past several thousand years, we have seen the replacement of God as the centre of creation to humans being in that centre, to finally something odd called the 'environment'. Even the Medievals were not this daft to create a false god out of climate changes....or false ideals of demographics.

"The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for them, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they – this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that man might hope again in wretched darkness.”

Well, yeah. Its a second mistake to let greens control language as "enviromentalists."

Hell,l what does that make anyone criticizing these corrupt stooges? Anti-enviromentalists?

But yes, strange environmentalists, indeed. I haven't seen a word of protest about the China Syndrome melt down at Fukushima. But instead wish to carbon tax the breath of bicycle riders. I'm lead to the conclusion a little plutonium is good for you, but common breathing is deadly to the planet.

Environmentalists worship their own false god, `mother nature, and then have the audacity to claim we Christians practice pagan rituals. This is a testament to how deluded their thinking has become. God will judge harshly those who put other gods before Him.

Perhaps mindRider but there is something about asking people to observe an hour of darkness to contemplate the Earth that. It's difficult to think of the Earth and darkness without also thinking about the moon and stars.

It is a symbolic darkness - a perfect metaphor for the darkness of death, disease, delusion, disorientation and depravity that the 'enlightened' have embraced in the name of Political Correctness and demand that everyone else do so. The Politically Correct position is scientifically, clinically and statistically incorrect, but that doesn't make any difference to the political elite - they will enforce it anyway. PC really means PUNITIVE CONFORMITY after all and no one can have a job or speak a word that does not conform to the PC standard. The New Dark Age has come and no one dare light a candle of truth to dispute it.

The most active non-Muslim terrorist group is Planned Parenthood which not only exists based on the murder of the innocents but covers up rape and incest. Domestic terrorism is just as insidious as terrorism from Islamic demons.

Anony--it is punitive conformity. Still, try as they will millions of people will continue to start their days by covering there eyes to say the Shema and uncover their eyes to light and wonder to what the Creator has created and bless the Creator.

In a previous comment I mentioned words and word associations and creations. I think the Hebrew word dvar is important.

What will words create in a PC world? We saw a glimpse of it in 1984. Orwell was right about words and changing language.

Progressives can call an embryo a thing but what sort of thing? Tissue to be destroyed when others see it as life and a fetus as a baby. When they claim to love the Earth they dodge the name of the planet G-d created for us and on a symbolic level dimiss what G-d created.

I don't know--liberals and progressives really want to manipulate and control words and define things for us. the PC crowd is creating a world of sorts for us.

Daniel Greenfield﻿'s quote, that "No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people" reminded me of this, from Heinrich Heine:"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."Translation: "Wherever they burn books, they will also burn people at the end."

Since when has mother nature ever been so motherly? History is replete with her wishes to keep us sufficiently culled. She drowns, fries, suffocates, freezes and starves quiet easily not to mention her arsenal of diseases. Environmentalist die-hards would love to see the earth flourish without a single human occupant upon it but, then, who would care or even notice?

It's not enough to kill man, tear down his cities and put out his lights. His cats and dogs and his cows and sheep must also die.

Isn't is mysterious how the Environazis routinely leave out goats? Feral goats(capra hicus) are among the most destructive of all so-called "domesticated animals". They can climb trees and also strip saplings of bark, doing much damage in the process. Their sharp hooves tend to churn soil and, being omnivorous herbivores (so to speak), there is little that they do not eat.

While I typically refrain from attributing to conspiracy that which can be explained by simple stupidity, it would be no surprise if Leftist environmental types were giving goat-loving (in all respects) Muslims a free pass.